MIKE
STECKER.com

Glenn Beck, Social Justice, and the Limits of Public Discourse

(via Albert Mohler)

Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck is famous for launching verbal grenades, and he did so again in recent days, calling upon church members to flee congregations that promote social justice. His comments incited an immediate controversy, where far more heat than light has yet been evident. As expected, there is more to this story than meets the eye -- or may reach the ear via the public conversation.

During his March 2, 2010 radio broadcast, Beck said this:

I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice" on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I'm going to Jeremiah's Wright's church? Yes! Leave your church. Social justice and economic justice. They are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, "Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?" I don't care what the church is. If it's my church, I'm alerting the church authorities: "Excuse me, what's this social justice thing?" And if they say, "Yeah, we're all in that social justice thing," I'm in the wrong place.

Almost immediately, reaction statements emerged with furor, found in press releases and public statements made by figures like Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis and various social justice advocacy groups. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, various media outlets rounded up the "usual suspects." The resultant public conversation has not been very substantial, but it has offered media magnetism.

Some of those outraged by Beck's statements immediately insisted that social justice is the very heart of the Gospel, while others insisted with equal force that Beck had offered a courageous call for Christians to flee liberal churches that had abandoned the Gospel.

As anyone familiar with incendiary public debates should have expected, though the truth is a bit harder to determine, the issue is indeed worth whatever hard thinking a clarification of the issue requires.

Is Glenn Beck right? That is the question most in the media were asking, along with a good number of Christians who were aware of the debate. With just a few words, Beck, a convert to Mormonism, set the world of American religion into a frenzy of discourse.

At first glance, Beck's statements are hard to defend. How can justice, social or private, be anything other than a biblical mandate? A quick look at the Bible will reveal that justice is, above all, an attribute of God himself. God is perfectly just, and the Bible is filled with God's condemnation of injustice in any form. The prophets thundered God's denunciation of social injustice and the call for God's people to live justly, to uphold justice, and to refrain from any perversion of justice.

The one who pleases the Lord is he who will "keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice" (Gen. 18:19). Israel is told to "do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor" (Lev. 19:15). God "has established his throne for justice" (Psalm 9:7) and "loves righteousness and justice" (Psalm 33:5). Princes are to "rule in justice" (Is. 32:1) even as the Lord "will fill Zion with justice and righteousness" (Is. 33:5). In the face of injustice, the prophet Amos thundered: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:18). In a classic statement, Micah reminded Israel: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

To assert that a call for social justice is reason for faithful Christians to flee their churches is nonsense, given the Bible's overwhelming affirmation that justice is one of God's own foremost concerns.

But, there is more going on here. Glenn Beck's statements lacked nuance, fair consideration, and context. It was reckless to use a national media platform to rail against social justice in such a manner, leaving Beck with little defense against a tidal wave of biblical mandates.

A closer look at his statements reveals a political context. He made a specific reference to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to other priests or preachers who would use "social justice" and "economic justice" as "code words." Is there anything to this?

Of course there is. Regrettably, there is no shortage of preachers who have traded the Gospel for a platform of political and economic change, most often packaged as a call for social justice.

The immediate roots of this phenomenon go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when figures like Washington Gladden, a Columbus, Ohio pastor, promoted what they called a new "social gospel." Gladden was morally offended by the idea of a God who would offer his own Son as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinful humanity and, as one of the founders of liberal theology in America, offered the social gospel as an alternative message, complete with a political agenda. It was not social reform that made the social gospel liberal, it was, its theological message. As Gary Dorrien, the preeminent historian of liberal theology, asserts, the distinctive mark of the social gospel was "its theology of social salvation."

Even more famously, the social gospel would be identified with Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal figure of the early twentieth century. Rauschenbusch made his arguments most classically in his books, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). In a 1904 essay, "The New Evangelism," Rauschenbusch called for a departure from "the old evangelism" which was all about salvation from sin through faith in Christ, and for the embrace of a "new evangelism" which was about salvation from social ills and injustice in order to realize, at least partially, the Kingdom of God on earth. He called for Christian missions to be redirected in order to "Christianize international politics."

The last century has seen many churches and denominations embrace the social gospel in some form, trading the Gospel of Christ for a liberal vision of social change, revolution, economic liberation, and, yes, social justice. Liberal Protestantism has largely embraced this agenda as its central message.

The urgency for any faithful Christian is this -- flee any church that for any reason or in any form has abandoned the Gospel of Christ for any other gospel.

As I read the statements of Glenn Beck, it seems that his primary concern is political. Speaking to a national audience, he warned of "code words" that betray a leftist political agenda of big government, liberal social action, economic redistribution, and the confiscation of wealth. In that context, his loyal audience almost surely understood his point.

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ -- the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church's main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ's command and the example of the apostles.

There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

Faithful Christians can debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets. Bringing all these things into submission to Christ is no easy task, and Gospel must not be tied to any political system, regime, or platform. Justice is our concern because it is God's concern, but it is no easy task to know how best to seek justice in this fallen world.

And that brings us to the fact that the Bible is absolutely clear that injustice will not exist forever. There is a perfect social order coming, but it is not of this world. The coming of the Kingdom of Christ in its fullness spells the end of injustice and every cause and consequence of human sin. We have much work to do in this world, but true justice will be achieved only by the consummation of God's purposes and the perfection of God's own judgment.

Until then, the church must preach the Gospel, and Christians must live out its implications. We must resist and reject every false gospel and tell sinners of salvation in Christ. And, knowing that God's judgment is coming, we must strive to be on the right side of justice.

Glenn Beck's statements about social justice demonstrate the limits of our public discourse. The issues raised by his comments and the resultant controversy are worthy of our most careful thinking and most earnest struggle. Yet, the media, including Mr. Beck, will have moved on to any number of other flash points before the ink has dried on this kerfuffle. Serious-minded Christians cannot move on from this issue so quickly.

________________________________

ABC World News Tonight, "Beck Attacks Church, Christians Boycott," broadcast March 12, 2010. I (Albert Mohler) appear (very briefly) in this coverage.

Tobin Grant, "Glenn Beck" 'Leave Your Church,'" Christianity Today, "Political Advocacy Tracker," posted March 12, 2010. This appears to be the best source for the transcript of Glenn Beck's comments.

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003).

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).

Walter Rauschenbusch, "The New Evangelism," Independent, 56 (May 12, 1904). Found in William R. Hutchison, ed., American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era (University Press of America, 1968), pp. 108-116.

Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus

Nothing is more central to the Bible than Jesus’ death and resurrection. The entire Bible pivots on one weekend in Jerusalem over two thousand years ago. In his new book Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, D.A. Carson unpacks the meaning of the most scandalous event in history by looking at what the earliest witnesses of Jesus’ death and resurrection wrote.

Dr. Carson is a world renowned author and theologian. He visited Mars Hill Church in December 2008 and gave a lecture series based on the material found in Scandalous. Audio and video from the event can be found here.

(via The Resurgence)

One Way a Very Public Christian Spoke

On September 13, 1980, Charles Malik gave an address called “The Two Tasks” at the opening of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. He was the Lebanese Ambassador to the United States. The message was so seminal that in 2006 (his centenary) it was republished with a collection of essays built around it. What strikes us as he stands to speak is the personal dimension and the public scope of his Christian commitment.

I speak to you as a Christian. Jesus Christ is my Lord and God and Savior and Song day and night. I can live without food, without drink, without sleep, without air, but I cannot live without Jesus. Without him I would have perished long ago. Without him and his church reconciling men to God, the world would have perished long ago. I live in and on the Bible for long hours every day. The Bible is the source of every good thought and impulse I have. In the Bible God himself, the Creator of everything from nothing, speaks to me and to the world directly, about himself, about ourselves, and about his will for the course of events and for the consummation of history. And believe me, not a day passes without my crying from the bottom of my heart, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’

Charles Malik (1906-1987), Lebanon’s ambassador to the USA (1945-55), President of the UN General Assembly (1958-59), professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut (1962-76). Quoted from “The Two Tasks” in The Two Tasks of the Christian Scholar: Redeeming the Soul, Redeeming the Mind, eds. William Lane Craig and Paul M. Gould (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2007), p. 55.

Avatar: Advertisement For Paganism

To Save A Life

What does inerrancy mean? Is it essential to Christian belief?

Spend five worth-while minutes via video with scholar D. A. Carson on the topic of the Bible’s inerrancy:

Beggars

All you great men of power,
you who boast of your feats,
politicians and entrepreneurs:
Can you safeguard your breath in the night while you sleep,
keep your heart beating steady and sure?
As you lie in your bed,
does the thought haunt your head,
that your really rather small?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you champions of science,
And rulers of men:
Can you summon the sun from its sleep?
And does the earth seek your council on how fast to spin?
Can you shut up the gates of the deep?
And don’t you know that all things,
hang as if by string o’er the darkness,
poised to fall?
If there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

All you big-shots do swagger,
and strive with conceit.
Did you devise that your fray would be fought?
If you’ve been raised in a palace,
or live about on the streets,
(did you) choose the place or the hour you’d be born?
Tell me what can you claim?
Not a thing!
Not your name!
Tell me if you can recall,
just one thing, not a gift, in this life?
Can you hear what’s been said?
Can you see now that everything’s graced?
After all,
if there’s one thing I know in this life,
We are beggars all!

Barack Obama’s Inspiring Life Story

by Glenn Beck:

Today is a very special day: It’s President Obama’s birthday. He turned 48 — only 16 more “czars” to appoint before his age equals total “czars.”

Here’s the One Thing: It’s been an amazing life for the 44th president. I, like the rest of America, am inspired by his story, so I’d like to share it with you.

The story of Barack Obama starts with his parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. It began like any other classic American love story, when these two lovebirds met while taking a Russian language class in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. By 1961 they were married and later that year Barack Obama, Jr. was born.

President Obama so movingly told the story during a speech commemorating the anniversary of the civil rights march in Selma:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, MARCH 4, 2007)

BARACK OBAMA: “But something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama… because some folks were willing to march across a bridge… so they got together and Barack Obama, Jr., was born….”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Wait, didn’t that march happen in 1965? Obama was born in 1961. I’m going to cut him some slack — it’s his birthday.

When little Barack, Jr., was 3-years-old (still one year shy of the actual Selma march) his parents divorced. Dad moved to Kenya and mom married an Indonesian man. From ages six to 10, Barack Obama, Jr., attended school in Jakarta.

At age 10, now living with his grandparents and back in Hawaii, young Barack yearned for a father figure. He eventually gravitated towards a family friend named Frank — also known as Frank Marshall Davis, would become his childhood mentor.

Frank just happened to be a communist. The good news is, mom already spoke Russian. No one knows for sure what mentor and pupil talked about, probably baseball or something else teenage boys enjoy. But definitely not communist propaganda.

Now 19, armed with a new worldview and an eagerness to learn, Obama attended Columbia University. His mentor, Frank, would have been proud of how he made use of his time there:

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, ‘DREAMS OF MY FATHER’)

BARACK OBAMA: Political discussions, the kind at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conference I sometimes attended at Cooper Union.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

And when he wasn’t attending socialist conferences, Obama stayed on campus and chose his friends carefully:

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, ‘DREAMS OF MY FATHER’)

BARACK OBAMA: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

Once his “Marxist professor” friends completed his education, it was on to the real world. In his mid-20s, Obama moved to Chicago and became a community organizer.

While he was organizing things there, many friends and friendships budded. He met like-minded people like William Ayers. Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground and participated in the bombing of the Pentagon in 1972 and other bombings of government buildings.

Oh, Glenn! Stop your hatemongering! Ever hear of forgiveness? We make mistakes, own up to them and move on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, FEBRUARY 23, 2009)

WILLIAM AYERS, FORMER WEATHER UNDERGROUND LEADER: I don’t regret anything I did to oppose the war. Anything I did to oppose the war. Don’t regret.

ALAN COLMES, HOST OF ‘THE ALAN COLMES SHOW’: You wouldn’t regret setting bomb at a police station or setting a bomb at the Pentagon or the capital?

AYERS: You know I don’t look back on those things and regret them…

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Nice, kind people kept popping up in Obama’s adult life, like slumlord Tony Rezko, who helped him buy a nice house. Obama shared many dinners with former University of Chicago professor and terrorist sympathizer Rashid Khalidi. Obama thanked Khalidi for opening his eyes to the problems of the Palestinians and praised him in a sendoff speech as Khalidi headed for Columbia University.

About the same time, Obama also sought a relationship with God and he eventually settled down in a quaint Chicago Church, where his worldview continued to sprout:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Life was turning out grand for Obama: A communist family mentor, super radical friends, a wonderful church. It couldn’t get any better, could it? But it did, when he met his soul mate, Michelle:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, FEBRUARY 18, 2008)

MICHELLE OBAMA: For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Spiritually, physically and ideologically the two were a perfect match. They married and the faithful Michelle would stand by her man on his political journey from the Illinois Senate in 1996 all the way to the Oval Office.

Despite the meteoric success, Obama hasn’t forgotten his roots. He’s still honoring his communist childhood mentor with each policy he drafts and he’s still networking and organizing and meeting and new friends. Friends like:

• Green “czar” Van Jones, the self avowed communist

• Science “czar” John Holdren, who is pro putting sterilants in the drinking water, forced abortions and government confiscation of babies

• Regulatory “czar” Cass Sunstein, a champion for getting animals legal rights

• Energy “czar” Carol Browner

I could go on forever about your crazy, wacky friends, Mr. President, but that would take time away from you on your birthday.

I want to wish you a happy birthday, but that wouldn’t be sufficient. So, Mr. President, we — the collective — wish you a very, happy birthday.

Snow Leopard, Finely tuned

While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost.

You’ve heard it’s cheaper, faster and even more stable than ever before. Though Apple has stated that, beyond a few high-profile features like a new version of Quicktime, Snow Leopard is more of a maintenance upgrade for Leopard users, rather than the feature-packed blockbuster we’re normally used to with a full version number upgrade. You might call Snow Leopard a comprehensive tune-up.

As is almost always the case with Apple, though, it’s those little tune-ups to Mac OS X that can make all the difference in your daily computing experience. If you happened upon the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page on Apple’s Web site, you no doubt found at least a handful of things that brings a smile to your face.

Sure, I’m looking forward to a speedier, fully-Cocoa Finder, a fancy new version of Quicktime, and a faster, much smaller OS X installation just as much as the next guy. But of much more interest to me are all of the minor tweaks that will make more of an impact in my daily routine.

Gamma Update

For starters, and one thing near and dear to my heart; Apple has chosen to change the default Gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. For many users the benefit may not be obvious. If you’ve ever noticed photos and graphics on the Web that appear much lighter or washed out than the ones you have on your Mac, it’s because Windows, the Internet, and most television content standardized on Gamma 2.2 long ago. With Snow Leopard, Mac users will enjoy more consistent color across platforms by default.

Finer Finder

iStat calendar menu feature

The Finder’s menu bar clock will soon show the date alongside the time. You can do this now with a finicky hack, but it’ll be handy to turn it on and off with the click of a button. One thing I wish Apple would add here is the ability to display a small calendar with clickable dates that launch iCal without using any third-party utilities, such as iStat. Baby steps, I guess.

Another minor Finder annoyance are the window sidebar headers: Search For, Devices and Places. They can be turned off in Snow Leopard. I always found them to be uselessly taking up space, since I don’t use the search feature, and rarely require Devices and Places. This leaves room for three more folder shortcuts in my sidebar without resizing the window. Adjusting the size of icons via a small slider in every Finder window, saving a trip to the View options window, will be a small, but welcome addition as well.

Apps and Utilities

iChat will see numerous improvements under Snow Leopard such as a lower bandwidth requirement, as will Preview, which will offer improved image scaling and an annotation toolbar. Preview is one of those apps that most users overlook. But if you take the time to investigate, you’ll find it to be quite a powerful and useful little app. For many consumer users, there’s no need to download Acrobat Reader because Preview actually offers more features.

File sharing via Airport Express will be improved for local network users. If you have a Mac acting as a file server over an Airport network, it will continue to share those files, even if the host Mac goes into sleep mode. And now your Airport strength meter will display the signal strength of all available networks before you connect to them. Nice!

Internet Improvements

Safari isn’t the only Internet app Apple has been working on. Mail and iCal have received some much-welcomed improvements, too. Mail’s ability to reorder mailboxes in the sidebar is enough to quench my thirst alone, but I won’t complain about the speedier display of messages, and improved HTML mail composition thrown-in for good measure. iCal will also make it easier to set up your Gmail or Yahoo calendars, and being forced to open a new inspector window for each task will be a thing of the past. While business users will surely love Microsoft Exchange support, most-everyone else could care less; these modest changes will give everyone something to feel warm and fuzzy about.

In Conclusion

While none of these features are game-changing, they’re all extremely useful. In my eyes, they’re much more sexy than Cocoa Finder, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, smaller installation size, and the other big-ticket items. These little features are the ones I’ll interact with on a daily basis, along with faster start-up and shut-down times. I liken it to the cup-holder locations in a new car — it doesn’t mean a lot on its own, but if done poorly can certainly sway your buying decision whether you realize it or not.

For a $29 upgrade price for Leopard users ($169 for non-Leopard users), you’re getting some stunning under-the-hood improvements, and some pretty darn nice refinements that may not be typical Apple front-page news, but are incredibly useful. Finely tuned indeed.

No, Mr. President

John Piper provides a thoughtful and firm response to the cloudy, contradictory, and killing view that most of our culture, including our President, holds . . . for now that is.

New Hillsong Live!

Let me be one of the first present the world premiere video of Joel Houston singing “No Reason to Hide” from their soon to be released album FAITH + HOPE + LOVE.

If that makes your ears happy, you won’t have to wait for long to own the entire album. It releases on August 4. You can use my Amazon link to pre-order this bad boy today.

Obama booed at All-Star game

At last night’s MLB All-Star Game, President Obama was booed after throwing out the first pitch. Actually if you listen closely, it sounded like they were booing him from the introduction. Fans at home weren’t able to see exactly where the ball landed, but it seemed to me that Obama threw a decent pitch.

Baseball aficionados said he threw like a sissy, but really, give the guy a break, you can’t expect him to be good at everything. Sporting his black and white Chicago White Sox jacket, Obama jogged onto the field and waved to the St. Louis crowd before the first throw.

Compared to George W. Bush’s famous strike in the 2001 World Series, Obama couldn’t compare. But Cardinals star catcher Albert Pujols noted that pitch did make it to the plate.

Twitter will KILL YOU!

Billy Graham – Atheism Is A Fad Only Fools Follow

Yes, atheism has been in the public eye more in recent years, largely because of a few atheists who've captured the public's attention through their books. They aren't large in number, but they do tend to be aggressive in promoting their ideas.

Why have they drawn so much attention? One reason, I believe, is because they know how to use the media very effectively. They also appeal to people who want to be free from God or any moral restraints. Like the philosophers of Paul's day who were constantly looking for new ideas to debate, many people today eagerly latch on to the latest fad (see Acts 17:21). Atheism attracts their attention, at least for a while.

In reality, however, modern atheists have very little new to say. In fact, atheism has been around for thousands of years; even the Psalmist, writing hundreds of years before Christ, referred to them: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God' " (Psalm 14:1).

Don't be misled by those who claim God doesn't exist, because he does. And the ultimate reason we know it is because he came down from heaven and walked on this earth in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ was God in human flesh, and he proved it by rising from the dead.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson 1958-2009

(via TMZ)